Alfred Gilbert was one of Henry’s sincere admirers in the old Lyceum days, and now if you want to hear any one talk of those days brilliantly, delightfully, and whimsically, if you want to live first nights and Beefsteak Room suppers over again—­if you want to have Henry Irving at the Garrick Club recreated before your eyes, it is only Alfred Gilbert who can do it for you!

He lives now in Bruges, that beautiful dead city of canals and Hans Memlings, and when I was there a few years ago I saw him.  I shall never forget his welcome!  I let him know of my arrival, and within a few hours he sent a carriage to my hotel to bring me to his house.  The seats of the fiacre were hidden by flowers!  He had not long been in his house, and there were packing-cases still lying about in the spacious, desolate rooms looking into an old walled garden.  But on the wall of the room in which we dined was a sketch by Raffaele, and the dinner, chiefly cooked by Mr. Gilbert himself,—­the Savoy at its best!

Some people regret that he has “buried” himself in Bruges, and that England has practically lost her best sculptor.  I think that he will do some of the finest work of his life there, and meanwhile England should be proud of Alfred Gilbert.

In a city which can boast of some of the ugliest and weakest statues in the world, he has, in the fountain erected to the memory of the good Lord Shaftesbury in Piccadilly Circus, created a thing of beauty which will be a joy to future generations of Londoners.

The other day Mr. Frampton, one of the leaders of the younger school of English sculptors, said of the Gilbert fountain that it could hold its own with the finest work of the same kind done by the masters of the past.  “They tell me,” he said, “that it is inappropriate to its surroundings.  It is.  That’s the fault of the surroundings.  In a more enlightened age than this, Piccadilly Circus will be destroyed and rebuilt merely as a setting for Gilbert’s jewel.”

“The name of Gilbert is honored in this house,” went on Mr. Frampton.  We were at the time looking at Henry Irving’s death-mask which Mr. Frampton had taken, and a replica of which he had just given me.  I thought of Henry’s living face, alive with raffish humor and mischief, presiding at a supper in the Beefsteak Room—­and of Alfred Gilbert’s Beethoven-like head with its splendid lion-like mane of tawny hair.  Those days were dead indeed.

Now it seems to me that I did not appreciate them half enough—­that I did not observe enough.  Yet players should observe, if only for their work’s sake.  The trouble is that only certain types of men and women—­the expressive types which are useful to us—­appeal to our observation.

I remember one supper very well at which Bastien-Lepage was present, and “Miss Sarah” too.  The artist was lost in admiration of Henry’s face, and expressed a strong desire to paint him.  The Bastien-Lepage portrait originated that evening, and is certainly a Beefsteak Room portrait, although Henry gave two sittings for it afterwards at Grafton Street.  At the supper itself Bastien-Lepage drew on a half-sheet of paper for me two little sketches, one of Sarah Bernhardt and the other of Henry, which are among my most precious relics.